Feature Articles

Disposable Use Proliferates in Production

Converts Insist that Single-Use Systems Are Surefire Way to Save Time and Money

More Competition and Choices

Despite the spate of mergers and acquisitions among vendors of single-use equipment, end-users feel there is a greater diversity of available products and more competition and choice today than ever before. Vendors are moving vertically and horizontally from their original positions as suppliers of storage bags, membranes, or reactors to supply integrated systems with broad processing ability in completely or nearly completely disposable format.

GE Healthcare’s Wave Biotech division, a leader in bioreactor bags for years, now faces competition from Xcellerex, Thermo Scientific Hyclone, and Applikon Biotechnology.

Working volumes in Wave bags, whose contents are agitated through rocking on a mechanical table, go up to 500 L, whereas the Xcellerex XDR™ Single-Use Bioreactors, which are supported by a stainless steel tank, feature volumes of up to 2,000 L.

Xcellerex has published an economic analysis on its website that claims its bioreactors can reduce capital investment by 75%, lower operating costs by 35%, and accelerate time to start-up by 10 months compared with conventional stainless steel equipment.

Xcellerex also offers a disposable mixing system at volumes of up to 1,000 L, the XDA disposable, single-use product contact assembly that includes gas filters, agitation system components, sparge components, probes, ports, pressure sensors, sampling ports, and gas and liquid transfer tubes.

Intermediate in size are Thermo Scientific Hyclone’s BioProcess Container™ systems, with volumes ranging from 50 mL to 1,500 L. Applikon serves the low-volume side of the business with its Appliflex process bags, available in 10, 20, and 50 L sizes and fitted with sensors for measuring temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen. Like Wave, Applikon agitates bioreactor bags by rocking them on a mechanical platform.

Scale-Up an Issue

“The amount of mass you have to rock back and forth, or otherwise mix in disposable fashion, becomes critical.” Laureate Pharma currently uses bags of up to 500 liters in working volume, but is considering Thermo Scientific Hyclone’s and Xcellerex’ products with volumes of around 1,000 L.

While downstream operations have been adequately served for filtration and membrane adsorption, capture chromatography remains an area where disposables have not yet made inroads. Bind-and-elute steps, which rely on expensive resins, are still the domain of reusable media, whereas flow-through steps like virus removal and polishing are nearly all carried out in disposable formats.

Laureate is considering an evaluation of a ready-to-use chromatography format from GE Healthcare’s ReadyToProcess™ portfolio later this year. The columns come prepacked, sterile, and certified for packing efficiency but are not single-use in the traditional sense.

“Plus, they only come in predefined sizes,” notes Dr. Ultee. “Processors who need an in-between size may be forced to pay for the next highest size, and with high resin costs, it’s a drawback compared with pack-your-own.”

The company, which mostly produces clinical trial material on a contract basis, frequently works in batches in the 200 L to 500 L range. While this is considered the sweet spot for disposable bioreactors, at this time, Laureate only employs single-use bags for scale-up of cell cultures to inoculate its stainless steel bioreactors. “Bioprocess bags of this size working volume were not available when we started our business,” says Dr. Ultee.

Furthermore, process-monitoring and control systems were also less extensive on the disposable-bag bioreactors. The high cost of its installed stainless steel base, Laureate feels, is now behind them and encourages it to recoup its investment in that platform.

With an upper-limit operating scale of 2,000 L (in stainless), Laureate does not have any 100% disposable processes. While many of the tanks and storage vessels feeding this reactor are single-use, the company is wary of large-sized process bags due to the physics and logistics of operating at that scale in a disposable format.

“It can be done, but you have to build a steel tank to hold a plastic bag of that size,” notes Dr. Ultee. “Plus, the bags are difficult to work with and quite expensive.”

Analytics: The Final Frontier?

One hurdle to integrated, fully disposable bioprocessing has been analytics. This factor will grow in importance as PAT becomes more mainstream.

In April, Finesse entered a partnership with GE Healthcare to develop a control package for the Wave Bioreactor based on the Finesse TruLogic™controller and TruBio™ SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system. The project is expected to lead to a package for controlling Wave bioreactors for pH, dissolved oxygen, temperature, rocking speed, pressure, aeration, and weight, and support redundant sensor loops for pH or dissolved oxygen as well.

Earlier in the year, Finesse teamed up with Emerson Process Management to integrate the Finesse TruBio bioreactor control system with Emerson’s DeltaV digital automation system.

According to Barbara Paldus, Ph.D., CEO, the future looks bright for smart disposable systems with embedded sensing and control capability. The upper volume limit for disposable processing, about 2,000, should continue to serve biotech as customers become more comfortable with larger bag sizes and protein titers continue to rise.

“Eventually, there will be no reason to run a 15,000 liter bioreactor,” Dr. Paldus points out. Rising titers and its connections with bag vendors Thermo Scientific Hyclone, Xcellerex, and GE Healthcare Wave were partly responsible for Finesse’s revenues rising tenfold last year.

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